Book: The Social Contract

Premise and Problem
Rousseau asks how a just political order can make people obey the law and still remain free. He rejects the claim that force creates right and argues that legitimate authority must rest on consent. In the state of nature individuals have natural liberty and are moved by self-preservation and pity, but secure enjoyment of life and property is precarious. Social life creates interdependence and inequality; the challenge is to found a civil association that preserves as much freedom as possible while stabilizing rights and duties among equals.

The Social Pact
The solution is a pact by which each person alienates themselves and all their rights to the community as a whole, on equal terms. Because everyone gives up the same, no one loses more than another; the result is a moral and collective person, the sovereign people, whose will can speak in general laws. Individuals gain civil and moral liberty: not the license to do anything, but the freedom of living under laws they prescribe to themselves, with their impulses guided by common reason. Property becomes legitimate only when recognized by the community, bounded by what one needs and works, and protected because all have pledged to respect it. A recalcitrant citizen who violates the pact may be constrained by the whole, “forced to be free”, since freedom here means obedience to laws that reflect one’s own properly formed will.

General Will and Sovereignty
The sovereign is the people collectively, and its unique voice is the general will: the orientation to the common good. Rousseau distinguishes it from the “will of all,” which sums private interests and can be swayed by factions. The general will is always right in aim but can be mistaken in judgment; it requires good information, civic education, and procedures that minimize partial associations. Sovereignty is inalienable, indivisible, and cannot be represented. Deputies and representatives may administer, but they cannot will in the place of the people. When citizens vote on laws, they should ask not what suits them but what is just for all. Frequent assemblies, simple laws, and limited, small-scale polities foster the conditions under which the general will can be discerned.

Laws, Legislator, and Government
Laws express the general will and must be general in their terms: they prescribe to classes and situations, not to named individuals. Founding a people requires a rare figure, the Legislator, who proposes a constitutional framework and educates mores so that citizens come to love their laws; yet this figure cannot command and must work through persuasion and custom. Government is distinct from sovereignty: it is merely the executive (the prince or magistrates) that applies laws in particular cases. Its forms, democracy, aristocracy, monarchy, differ by how the executive is composed, not by who is sovereign; each suits different circumstances of size, climate, and mores. Every government tends to degenerate by concentrating power, so institutions like the tribunate and censorship are needed to mediate conflicts and protect public morals, while periodic popular checks recall officials to accountability.

Civil Religion, War, and Liberty
To stabilize loyalty, Rousseau sketches a civil religion: a minimal creed of belief in a just deity, the sanctity of the social pact, and tolerance of diverse faiths, while condemning intolerance that fractures civic unity. War is a relation between states, not individuals; prisoners are enemies, not criminals, and conquest cannot found legitimate right over persons. True freedom in civil society is equality under laws one helps make, with duties that reflect common ends. By transforming natural liberty into civil and moral liberty, the social contract promises a people of citizens rather than subjects, bound by a common will that secures both security and autonomy.